This is a copy/paste of a reply in a facebook thread about CISPA, internet privacy, and related issues. It got so long that I decided to expand it here to a blog post for all to see. Lucky you.
Hi there. It has been a while since I've made a post. I've been busy doing a few things, like trying to salvage the Django site structure while adding new features, learning Fabric, learning more about Linux, and so on. Through all of that experience, I learned some interesting things spread over various technologies that I'd like to share.
It has been a while since I last posted. That sounds like a confession,
but I'm not religious in that sense of the word. In reality, I'm talking about a window
manager used in a Linux Distribution. While some might think that
Linux users are zealots, I honestly think that is pretty far from
the truth.
Here's the skinny, if you either don't use Linux or don't understand what
a window manager is: a window manager keeps track of the windows you have
open in your GUI (graphical user interface), allows you to resize the windows
and move them around, close them, etc. When a program that uses a GUI is called
by the system (e.g. if you double click or type a terminal command to launch a
program), the program uses GUI libraries to bind text, graphics, etc., to windows,
sets window size, focus, allows controls to minimize, maximize, close, and other
things you might like to do with the windows that the application needs.
For instance, Gimp uses a lot of floating - AKA stacked - windows for things like brush pallettes,
plugins, layers, and other functions it needs, and you can minimize those ...
Lately, I've been tweaking, replacing, and reinstalling my Linux distributions. This takes a lot of time sometimes, but in the end I think that I'm following my needs and motivations and that the sacrifice is worthwhile. I'll start in the middle, since I can't remember the beginning: the weekend before last, I decided to install Cinelerra on my Linux Desktop, which was at that time running Debian stable (at this time - Squeeze). I changed the settings in /etc/apt/sources.list and did this:
I couldn't think of anything to call the second post of this blog/thing, so I decided to just be unoriginal. As you can see, the site hasn't changed much in a month, or has it? In the time since the first post - since that time when I celebrated my skill in not only getting Django working with a virtualenv, gunicorn, and nginx; since that time I have been tweaking security settings and other such "stuff" that you may be familiar with. Aside from tweaking and securing and doing other preparations so that I can use this site as a blog/showcase/whatever page, I have spent a lot of time trying to decide just what the focus of this site should be. It is about me, and the things I do, but where is the focus? Is it a site to advertise my skills in web development? A neo-tutorial site with python code snippets? A neo-tutorial site for Django coders? I suppose that in the end, the site will be all and none of these things. Stay tuned.
update 12/28/2011 Just to keep this historically acurate: This is/was the second post, but I typed ...